Columbia Law School Scholarship Archive Faculty Scholarship Faculty Publications 1998 The Erotic of Torts Carol Sanger Columbia Law School, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Sexuality and the Law Commons Recommended Citation Carol Sanger, The Erotic of Torts, 96 MICH. L. REV. 1852 (1998). Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/2567 This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Publications at Scholarship Archive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Scholarship Archive. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE EROTICS OF TORTS Carol Sanger* FEMINIST ACCUSED OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT. By Jane Gallop. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, Public Planet Books. 1997. Pp. 101. $9.95. I. "What kind of feminist would be accused of sexual harass- ment?" asks Jane Gallop (p. 1). Gallop quickly provides her own challenging answer: "the sort of feminist ... that ... do[es] not respect the line between the intellectual and the sexual" (p. 12). Gallop is firm and unrepentant about not respecting this line: "I sexualize the atmosphere in which I work. When sexual harassment is defined as the introduction of sex into professional relations, it becomes quite possible to be both a feminist and a sexual harasser" (p. 11). Figuring out what this means - and what its implications are for professors, for feminists, for law schools - is the task I've set for this review. I begin with a warning. As Margot Channing suggested some forty years ago, "Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a bumpy night."' The atmosphere that Gallop sexualizes is the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, where Gallop, "one of the ornaments of the post- structuralist school," 2 is a Distinguished Professor. Her best known books, Thinking Through the Body and The Daughter's Seduction, offer close readings of Sade, Freud, Lacan, Cixous, and Irigaray at the intersection of feminism and psychoanalysis. 3 FeministAccused of Sexual Harassment seems an altogether different kind of project. It offers a close reading of one woman, Jane Gallop herself, as the subject of sexual harassment complaints brought by two graduate * Professor of Law, Columbia Law School. B.A. 1970, Wellesley; J.D. 1976, Michigan. - Ed. I would like to thank Ed Baker, Carol Chomsky, Jane Ginsburg, Florence Keller, Eben Moglen, and Jeremy Waldron for their suggestions and Pam Scheininger, Columbia Law School, 1998, for excellent research assistance. I also thank participants at faculty work- shops at the University of Minnesota Law School, the University of Iowa College of Law, and Columbia Law School for thoughtful and good-natured comments. 1. ALL ABOUT EVE (20th Century Fox 1950). 2. Janet Malcolm, It Happened in Milwaukee, N.Y. REv. BooKs, Oct. 23, 1997, at 8. 3. JANE GALLOP, THINKING THROUGH THE BODY (1988); JANE GALLOP, THE DAUGH- TER'S SEDUCrION: FEMINISM AND PSYCHoANALYSIS (1982); other books include READING LACAN (1985); PEDAGOGY: THE QUESTION OF IMPERSONATION (1995); and AROUND 1981: ACADEMIC FEMINIST LrrERARY THEORY (1992) [hereinafter GALLOP, AROUND 1981]. 1852 May 1998] Sexual Harassment 1853 students after she kissed one of them in public. Feminist Accused - and Acquitted, although this outcome doesn't make its way to the title - is Gallop's effort to tell her story so that, as she puts it, everyone can "understand what's going on with sexual harassment."4 What's going on, according to Gallop, is doctrine gone haywire. No longer is sexual harassment concerned with brutish male bosses demanding sex from female subordinates in exchange for job secur- ity. Sexual harassment has moved from explicit demands and threats to "charged talk or behavior; implicit professional threats [that] could possibly cover the entire range of professional interac- tion" (p. 8). In addition to the potentially "limitless" possibilities in form, the cast of players has also increased (p. 8). "Harassment need not be perpetrated by bosses; peers can harass, even subordi- nates. And gender can be a variable: increasing numbers of cases involve a man claiming to have been harassed or a woman accused of harassment" (p. 8). Indeed, as things stand now, even a feminist can be accused, and even when the underlying relationship was heartily consensual. This, for Gallop, is the most troubling aspect of what is going on: the inclusion of consensual sexual or amorous relationships be- tween teachers and students within general harassment policies and prohibitions. FeministAccused takes aim at this "bloated... ram- pant expansion" (p. 8) and argues that sexual harassment as now conceptualized and applied in schools is stupid, regressive, and fatal both for sex and for the production of knowledge. Gallop argues that sexual harassment law and policy should have nothing to do with consensual relations between professors and graduate stu- dents, for two reasons. First, law should play no part in incapacitat- ing adult women by refusing yet again to recognize their desire for and ability to consent to sex. As she explains in a critique familiar to feminists, "Denying women the right to consent reinforces our status as objects rather than desiring subjects" (p. 38). Policies that deem all sex with professors sexual harassment are based on the protective assumption that "women do not know what we want, that someone else, in a position of greater knowledge and power, knows better" (pp. 38-39). Gallop's position is that adult women, even young adult women students, know and should be able to act on what they want. 4. P. 7. FEaNwisT ACCUSED is part of the new Public Planet Books series published by Duke University Press. The series aspires to "provide a running narrative of our societies at this particular fin de sidcle." Dilip Gaon Kar & Michael Warner, Introduction to Public Planet Book Series, appearing in JANE GALLOP, FEMINIsT ACCUSED OF SEXUAL HARAss- mE:NT (1997). It attempts "to open the scholarly discourse on contemporary public culture ...and to illuminate that discourse with the kinds of narrative that will challenge sophisti- cated readers, make them think, and especially make them question." Id. 1854 Michigan Law Review [Vol. 96:1852 Her second argument, perhaps less familiar to those who attend the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools rather than that of the Modem Language Association, is that teach- ing is at core an erotic enterprise. Intense, amorous, even sexual relations between professors and students lie at the heart of what good teaching is about - the production and acquisition of knowl- edge. The argument comes in varying strengths. Consider this mid- level version: "Whether it is perceived as an instrument of domi- nance or a mode of revelation, the educational process involves an emotionally suffused link between human beings. Its intimacies form a tangled web of intellectual aspiration and erotic desire."5 More simply, "learning and teaching are acts of desire and pas- sion."6' Gallop, however, endorses a stronger version, one that more or less goes the full Monty. Good professors should have stu- dents eager to sleep with them and there is nothing wrong in em- powering those students intellectually and sexually by taking them up on their offers (p. 12). She speaks as one who was so empow- ered7 and who has subsequently also empowered a number of her students.8 This may not be quite the way law professors are used to talking or thinking about what it is we do for a living. It may come as a surprise to some to learn that we have all along been teaching una- wares in some primordial sexual soup.9 Yet there is probably little disagreement about a weak version of academic erotics: the propo- sition that teaching involves passion. The erotics of pedagogy takes this comfortable, often noble, idea off its familiar hinge and accepts 5. Regina Barreca & Deborah Denenholz, Preface to THE EROTICS OF INsTRucrION at vii (Regina Barreca & Deborah Denenholz Morse eds., 1997). 6. Id. at viii. 7. "I learned and excelled; I desired and I fucked my teachers." P. 42. 8. Although Gallop and her plaintiff students were all women, the discussion here is not limited to same-sex faculty-student relations, as Gallop herself has not, in practice, and per- haps in theory, so limited herself. Consensual relations are, without question, complicated by the sexual identities of the various players - boy-girl, gay-lesbian-straight, etc. Gallop's the- orizing derives from her own case - an initially insecure young woman empowered by femi- nism and sex with big-deal men. Yet other combinations of traits among the players may produce other results. For example, does Gallop's bravado have the same radical appeal if we give her lines to a male professor? Does involvement with women professors similarly increase the mind-body confidence of young male students, or are we suddenly in Tea and Sympathy territory? It may be that because all students have less power within the institu- tion than their professors, they may be equally eligible for empowerment - or whatever - as a consequence of sleeping with their professors. On the other hand, the dynamic of why students fall for teachers or how officials enforce relationship policies may differ depending on everyone's respective sexualities. As this Review progresses, I will take account of these various distinctions when they seem to matter. 9. Indeed, it has been suggested that the phrase "sexual academic" is an oxymoron, like "jumbo shrimp" or "Greater Cleveland." See Regina Barreca, ContrabandAppetites, in THE EROTICS OF INsTRUCrON, supra note 5, at 1, 4. On the other hand, some contend that the phrase is not oxymoronic but redundant, like "working mother" or "dysfunctional family." See id.